


Phaneron

by violetnyte



Series: Lethe [3]
Category: Starfighter (Comic), Starfighter Eclipse
Genre: Alien Character(s), Colterons, Dubious Consent, Dubious Science, Freaky Bug Fucking, Horror, Human Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Torture, Light Angst, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Near Death Experiences, Other, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 21:14:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19449646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetnyte/pseuds/violetnyte
Summary: The only thing Ethos knows for certain is that he needs to leave, quickly, before this already terrible situation gets any worse.





	Phaneron

**Author's Note:**

> Although it's not strictly necessary to have read through at least one route of each story preceding this one in the series, it would helpful to do so before starting this one. Even better would be if you found the easter egg scenes but, again, it's not required. You can start reading here and have things make sense. 
> 
> Much thanks to prisma for encouraging me in these final desperate hours and everyone participating in the Summer Challenge theme week!

Consciousness trickled in slowly, like rain along a car window, the pieces flicking and dragging together to form a solid streaks. Sharp ache throbbed at his temple, the first sign something was wrong. Gradually he registered more thing wrong, like the harsh chemical smell coming off the stiff, scratchy bedding beneath him. This wasn’t his bed, it was a stranger’s bed, in a strange room, and Ethos opened his eyes with a gasp.

Sterile white ceiling greeted him. It ran seamlessly with inset panels of scorching bright lights, and Ethos winced his gaze away from staring directly at the blinding glow. It could also be the med-bay on the ship, except everything was wrong in such deeply irrefutable ways. In addition to the driving throb of a headache rampaging around in his skull, Ethos also felt groggily unsure of his own memories. It felt like an incomplete wakening from a dream, like maybe if he closed his eyes he’d sink back into fantasy.

Mish-mash chaos bounced around suggestions of what he might have been doing, prior to all this. Had he been on the Sleipnir, confounded and confused by a Colteron puzzle? Had he been on Earth, in a time where humanity knew nothing of the Colteron race? Had he been gently commanding a love-fueled coup to destroy them all, or was he instead an idyllic shepherd tending his flock on the rolling highland plains?

Ethos gripped at his head as he carefully sat upright. He wore a crisp paper-like garment dress in a strong, clean white color similar to a hospital gown, and that single flimsy item was all he wore. Ethos carefully winced his eyes open and took inventory of the plain, square room. 

Besides his bed and the door, there wasn’t much else to it. Stretching above the flat surface of the thin, hard mattress was an odd spiderweb of gleaming lines, although ethereal in their shimmering nothing. As he watched they further faded and shrank from view, and Ethos had the uncomfortable awareness that perhaps they’d been stretched over him at some point.

Ethos slipped his bare feet from the bed. He felt only a little bit shaky as he stood and crossed the small room to the door. With step he felt stronger and more sure of his own body, more sure of his own reality. He reached the door and ran his hands over the seemingly-smooth surface. He felt the inset texture of a small panel and pressed at it. 

The door slid open with a hushed hiss. In sharp contrast to the blindly white of the room behind him, the hallway beyond was coal dark and deeply shadowed. Black interlocking ridges ran along the floor, walls, and ceiling of the octagon-shaped corridor that stretched to either side. Regularly spaced rectangles indicated more doors similar to his. Each had a small slowly-blinking red light affixed to the top of a control panel. A dotted grid marked each door in silvery-white glow, and as Ethos stepped out into the hallway the door to his own room slid shut behind him. Five such dots marked his door in roughly an X-shape. The door immediately across from his had two rows of three, aligned like domino dots. Something about it tickled his jumbled memories, but he couldn’t place it.

From the end of the hall came a sudden noise, whooshing followed by an eerie clattering. Ethos felt hair rise along the back of his neck. Whatever that noise meant, he knew he couldn’t remain exposed in the hallway like this for when it reached him. 

Ethos turned and reached to find another inset panel to press open his original room, but the sleek black surface was smooth. He fumbled at the panel next without much luck, and by then the noise had gotten close enough his heart raced with terror. 

Surely this had to be a nightmare. Of all the jumbled half-forgotten dreams in his head, surely this of them all was the true nightmare. The steadily advancing clicking, that ominous clacking, it grew near enough that Ethos abandoned his escape efforts and turned to face the threat. 

Out of the shadowed hallway crept a fearsome sight. Despite the backward-bent leg joints that hunched its overall height, it stood easily a head and a half taller than Ethos. Interlocking, articulated plates of shiny black exoskeleton, possibly armor, covered its body. Fine hair-like ridges protruded along the bipedal legs and swept a line up the appendages serving as arms. Dual lids closed over the gleaming multifocal eyes in a nearly-audible blink, and a faint chirping kind of clicking accompanied the gesture. Wicked curving mandibles clacked together. 

Ethos clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream. More than anything he wanted to wake up. He didn’t want this to be real. Terror spiked within him. His whole body tensed as the fight-or-flight response kicked in, but he felt separate from the physical sensations. He felt disconnected from his body, fingers and toes numb with icy chill even as sweat bristled under his arms and across the back of his neck. Death seemed an irrevocable, unavoidable certainty. 

The Colteron clacked and clicked sounds of distress and aggression. Ethos winced his eyes shut and tried to think of pleasant thoughts in his last moments. He thought of simple pleasures like hot tea and a fresh book, warm sunny days with the smell of fresh-cut grass in the air, long late nights alive with fireflies and locusts, fresh-baked bread and cookies warm from the oven, his mother and aunts, his childhood pet cat Mister Fiddles, the day he passed the navigator exam.

Ethos expected those pointed claw-like hands to grasp him at any moment, for those thick serrated mandibles to rip into his flesh. His peeked out of one eye to check the progress of the Colteron. Close, and coming closer, almost within reach. 

At that moment, the ricocheting crack of a blaster rifle shot along the corridor. The Colteron jerked with the strike as a hole punched into its mid-thorax. Another crack of the blaster rifle, and a brittle chunk of head-containing exoskeleton exploded in a glistening burst of yellow-brown viscera. 

Ethos shrieked as the Colteron collapsed to the corridor floor in front of him. He tore his gaze from the twitching almost-corpse and saw two humans standing before him, each carrying a blaster rifle. One wore a fighter’s uniform, the other a navigator’s flight suit. They were shoulder-to-shoulder, blasters aimed and primed, deadly serious and lethally capable. Ethos had never seen a more beautiful sight. 

The navigator lifted his rifle. “Ethos?”

Ethos tried to answer, scratchy-voiced and weakly rasping like Deimos at first. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes. I’m Ethos. You’re…?”

The navigator inclined his chin slightly. “Selene.”

“I’m Helios,” the fighter said. He lowered his rifle and smiled, boyish and sweet desperate the seriousness of the situation and the dead enemy at their feet. The grin softened all his serious angles. “We’re here to save you.”


End file.
